


Thrill Divine

by maroon



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 07:39:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14208354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maroon/pseuds/maroon
Summary: So when she cornered the Winter Soldier and slammed him against the wall, her arm tight against his larynx and her other hand fisted in his Henley, his resounding and surprised gasp made her spine tingle in a way that a kill shouldn’t.“I loved himfirst.” She says indignantly, and the Winter Soldier just looked at her with those pale eyes, but Natasha could only continue, “You don’t even know how to love.I do.”





	Thrill Divine

**Author's Note:**

> the song i was listening to while writing this was Doris Day's [Again](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBqaRlDcmbw)

Natasha has always been a very observant person. From a young age, she’d been taught that her eyes are her most important asset, and with that, her brain. Her killer’s hands comes as a quick and efficient second, and then her killer’s legs and killer’s feet.

 

Madame B. had held always held her higher than the other Red Room trainees. _Natalia_ , she’d said, in her mother’s voice, with her mother’s eyes, grey-blue, stormy like the skies above a sea, _your eyes serve as your greatest and only ally_ , she’d whisper into Natasha’s long red hair as she combed through it, the bristles soft and the sound of the teeth of the comb scraping against the curls of Natasha’s hair.

 

And her eyes were. _Are_. Her greatest ally. Not so much her _only_ ally, now, but when it matters, her eyes are the only thing she could count on.

 

Her eyes see what she can’t smell or hear. The small smile of a colleague. Twinkle of brown eyes alight with laughter ( _beautiful_ ). Roughened hands, killer’s hands, just like hers, on top of shoulders, shoulders thickened with labour that old money had not shielded him away from, holding on, scared of falling into the abyss of the Alps again.

 

That did not mean she did not learn how to fight in the dark, no. The Winter Soldier taught her that. _Your eyes are useless in the darkness_ , he’d said as he grips her chin in a harsh hold, blood seeping from his rapidly healing nose (she had been _proud_ to have broken his nose), _use your skin_. Then, he’d tossed her against the wall and Natasha snarled, lashing out and clawing, trying to catch the man who’d made her feel _more_ like a weapon, but a weapon with more uses, so no one would _dare_ throw her away.

 

The Winter Soldier taught her how to feel, and a young woman with coiling black-brown hair named _Anastasia_ taught her how to _hear_.

 

 _“The swing of a blade_ ,” she had said into Natasha’s ear one night, sitting with her chest to Natasha’s back, the cold kept away by warmth that should have abandoned them a long, long time ago, “ _is_ _a song. Do you hear?_ ”

 

Natasha had leaned her head back, letting her neck be vulnerable as the girl behind her swung her knife in front of both of them. There was trust, then. And there was love.

 

They were children.

 

 _Love is for children_.

 

Now, there is only longing.

 

**

 

Natasha is touch-starved.

 

Surprise almost caught her off guard when she found out that Tony Stark is, too.

 

Her initial report of Tony _actually_ went like this:

 

 _Anthony Edward Stark displayed reckless behaviour that could be attributed to the advanced state of palladium poisoning he was in_.

 

But she’d crossed that out with a red pen, and began writing in a blue pen, the colour of neutrality, _Stark, Anthony is not recommended for the Avengers_. She pauses, brings up a hand to fan at the ink, and resumes to write again.

 

(Funny, it’s Tony who asks her about the colour coded way that she writes, with a rough but smooth and _soft_ hand on her shoulder, like an anchor she didn’t know she needed. She didn’t answer him, instead, she threatened him that if he ever look over her shoulder again—or put his hand on her again—to peer at her work, he’d be without an eye. She doesn’t mean it, of course. But the easier answer would have been that she likes colours.)

 

She’d taught Anastasia the wonders of her eyes. Anastasia had these beautiful amber eyes that remained the same colour even in the dark, glinting like the glare of a crosshair, and Natasha had sat both of them down, far too old to be giggling the way they did, and _coloured_.

 

 _Stark had begun seeing his life as coming to an end_ —

 

The Winter Soldier had no time for her childlike ramblings and colours. He used his eyes as weapons, as they all should, but Natasha was _young_. Natasha was young, and she was in love (the best she could, given the circumstances), and colour meant everything to her. Her _eyes_ weren’t weapons, with Anastasia around. She could just see the thick, tight coils of Anastasia’s hair, _black-brown_ , and the colour of her skin, a beautiful _umber_ that made her teeth seem beautiful and impeccable, the dark pink of her lips, like _mauve_ , and Natasha didn’t see Anastasia as her mission.

 

She was simply… Anastasia in the Red Room.

 

_Anthony Edward Stark had ceased all attempts to save himself._

 

Natasha remembers the glint of red-and-gold and _reckless_ , she had catalogued it with her eyes, and she heard Stark’s rumbling laughter on her back, and she felt his warmth seep into her, drunk as he may be, sad as he may be, he _exuded_ warmth like it was his job to.

 

She hadn’t understood what it meant, at first.

 

The Iron Man gauntlet had hummed with power around her arm, twists of metal so complicated that she wonders if she’d understand a perplex machinery such as the Iron Man suit (which is, coincidentally, Tony Stark, too), but then, she was Natalie Rushman. Airhead, a woman who giggled, a woman who flashed her skin, a woman who was so blind she couldn’t see her boss dying in front of her.

 

So when he’d asked, when she’d put on that concealer on Tony Stark’s cheek, he leaned in, his eyelashes fluttering but never closing, his wide brown ( _amber_?) eyes looking up at her, _If this was the last birthday party you were going to have, what would you do_?

 

She had answered, with a sultry smile, because Natalie Rushman is _blind, blind, blind_ :

 

_I would do whatever I wanted to do, with whoever I wanted to do it with._

 

But she heard a question, so she’d provided him with the answer he wanted.

 

It didn’t surprise her that he’d take it to heart, as he laid destruction all around them, and Natasha had sizzled with anger, anger at such recklessness, anger at such _childishness_. But she kept it under a fake facade and a high pitched shriek, her hand grappling for Pepper Potts.

 

(" _One day, we’ll have to fight each other.”_

 

_“Yes.” Natasha pushed a stray black-brown curl behind a lightly curved ear._

 

_“If it was tomorrow, what would you want to do before one of us dies?”_

 

_Natasha laughed, because then, killing the love of her life was something that made her laugh. It was a far-fetched idea. Her eyes crinkled and Anastasia watched her with those pretty amber eyes._

 

_“We do whatever we want to do.”_

 

 _Anastasia’s smile was blinding._ )

 

Accounting all of that, she doesn’t figure out that she loves Anthony Edward Stark until after the Winter Soldier begins to wrap his silver fingers around Tony’s metal heart.

 

So when she cornered the Winter Soldier and slammed him against the wall, her arm tight against his larynx and her other hand fisted in his Henley, his resounding and surprised _gasp_ made her spine tingle in a way that a kill shouldn’t.

 

“I loved him _first_.” She says indignantly, and the Winter Soldier just looked at her with those pale eyes, but Natasha could only continue, “You don’t even know how to _love_. I _do_.”

 

Her love for Tony isn’t anything like the love she has for Anastasia. Anastasia’s was bright amber like a fire, coiling deep in her gut and at the pit of her heart, making her want to jump from the rooftops, making her want to hear the sound of a knife singing through the air, making her want to _live_ . Her love for Anastasia is _overwhelming_ and it required all of Natasha, it made Natasha give herself over to the small girl with the knack for throwing knives and scribbling in colour, her skin absorbing the colours all around her.

 

The love she feels for Tony is… _soft_. Coloured brown, like the upturned earth under her feet as she _runs away_ for the first time, and it settled into her cold joints, it settled into her killer’s hands, the hands that never quite learned how to unfreeze from around a Bowie knife. Her love for Tony runs deep like blood, makes her feel like she could be faster, stronger, _better_ . Her love for Tony Stark makes her feel like she could be unstoppable, because when Tony looks at her with his smile and his bright brown eyes, he’s not _Anastasia in the Red Room_ , he’s _Tony_ , who is _Iron Man_. He’s Tony, who believes in her, who _trusts_ her, who trusts her to _close that portal_ while he flies off into space, red-and-gold and _deliberate_.

 

He can _fly_ , he can shoot beams from his palms, he’s everything she’d wanted to be, soaring high like a sparrow, _free_ , the metal around his heart never melting from the rays of the sun, and Natasha can’t lose him to a man who doesn’t _know_ how to love, who doesn’t _care_ about a little girl’s ramblings, who can’t possibly _love_ Tony enough to make him flutter his eyes closed completely.

 

The Winter Soldier shook her off like she was nothing more than a child and furrowed his eyebrows, but he looked ashamed, from the curved line of his shoulders down to the tight clench of his fists, and Natasha knows he’s thinking of what she’s said.

 

So she walks away.

 

**

Natasha couldn’t fight the snarl that made it up her throat as she shot a Doombot in between the eyes, her own looking at the Iron Man armour from above, staggering in its flight but no less graceful, Tony’s comms cut off from all of them, and she can’t do anything, because she’s being swarmed herself, and the rest of them are, too.

 

The Winter Soldier cursed through their comm line, and Natasha forces herself not to shut off the line, Steve’s worried _Bucky!_ makes her look up to his sniper’s perch, where he’s barely kicking one of the four Doombots on him. Tony shoots the ‘bot from the sky, and Natasha started to focus on her own kills.

 

With another shot, she tries to make her way out of the horde of machinery, only to be dragged back by her hair, and she kicks her feet up, her steel toed boots meeting with metal and making it dent harshly enough for the Doombot to be stunned, letting go of her hair, and Natasha pulls him close, embedding a small bomb from her utility belt inside its guts and pushing it away, making a break for it as the Doombot absorbs the blast to make an even bigger one with its body.

 

A yell came from The Winter Soldier, and a Doombot latched on to the Iron Man suit, all but cannibalising the protective covering around Tony.

 

“Iron Man is being swarmed, I repeat, Iron Man is being swarme—” she chokes on her words as a Doombot clotheslines her, making her fall on her ass, her eyes blurring and doubling the same time as the Iron Man armour finally sputters on its last leg, the now graceless hunk of metal falling through the sky. Natasha closed her eyes to regain herself.

 

“ _Black W_ —”

 

( _Madame B. has always held her higher than the other children from the Red Room. She combed Natasha’s hair with a tenderness she didn't know that’s false. So when she snarled, bared her teeth and told the Winter Soldier to take Anastasia from her arms, still naked, still bare for all to see, her curls ever so vibrant, it took all of Natasha not to bare her teeth right back to the woman she considers her mother._

 

_But still, she stood, as naked as the day she was born, her still developing breasts heaving, lunging for the Winter Soldier, who is dragging a quiet Anastasia down to the cold marble of the training grounds, but the man struck Natasha down with his metal arm, dislodging her jaw._

 

Ana _, she’d thought_ , please fight back.

 

_Madame B took Natasha by the hair, pulling her head up to make her watch, and a moment passed, Natasha's eyes found Anastasia's, then, Madame B. snapped her fingers._

 

_The resounding crack of each beautiful vertebrae of Anastasia’s spine made Natasha gag, because she’d just ran her fingers on top of each of those knobs, memorising it under her fingertips._

 

 _Her resounding_ Anastasia! _makes her heartbeat quicken._

 

 _Madame B has always held her higher than the other Red Room trainees. But Natasha knew that she was disappointed in Natasha, because if she’d faught Anastasia, she’d_ lose _and_ lose happily. _)_

 

 _"—idow!_ "

 

Natasha bit her lip as she swings herself upward, catching a Doombot by the arm and using its momentum to slam the ‘bot into three more, upsetting their balance as she moved, as if she could catch Tony in her arms with all that metal around his body, but she’ll _try_ , and she’ll succeed,  because she’d been weak before, and she won’t let it get in the way of her saving the person she _loves_.

 

Love had made her weak. Love will also make her strong.

 

She stretched out her killer’s arms to save, but before she can, the Iron Man armour’s eyes sputtered and flickered back into that white light she knew well, dropping less than gently on the ground, but still _safe_.

 

Tony’s face is bleeding when he opens the faceplate, and Natasha turned at the same time he shouted _six o’clock_! at her, her gun already at the ready as she shot the two Doombots she’d upset earlier, making them drop uselessly against her feet.

 

Another one reared up at her, but before she could fire, a bullet hole is already in between both of its eye slits, and it drops like a brick.

 

Tony groans and lets himself slump. “God,” he huffs, “next time, tell me to make a Doombot repellant or something, _fuck_.”

 

The Winter Soldier chuckled, a laceration high on his head, walking on over to them in an uneven gait that told Natasha his leg might be fractured, and reaching his metal arm out for Tony to take, and Natasha shook her head, not bothering to watch as Tony takes The Winter Soldier’s hand to stand, armour and all, because The Winter Soldier is strong enough to do that.

 

“I knew you’d do some last minute shit.” The Winter Soldier said, oddly proud, and Natasha closed her ears, as well. She doesn’t need to hear this.

 

**

Clint is her brother in all but blood.

 

He’d helped her when she was a little more than feral, and he still does.

 

So when he delivers a gut punch that gushes the air out of her lungs, it’s easy for him to say, “This is a _team_ , fuckhead.”

 

Which isn’t surprising, coming from him. He had a family—a loving wife and loving kids and a brother who trusts him— _camaraderie_ is embedded into his DNA.

 

Natasha furrowed her eyebrows, “I know,” she said lightly as she leaped back and arched into a flawless cartwheel to put some distance between her and Clint, whose chest is heaving. They’ve been sparring since the end of their debriefing, with Tony’s head on her shoulder, half-asleep from overexhaustion, The Winter Soldier watching her intently.

 

She’ll admit that the polished oak table dented under the force of her fingers when The Winter Soldier ushered Tony out with a careful hand on the small of the man’s back, Tony whining about how he’s not cut out for the superhero life anymore, since he wasn’t _suped up_ like The Winter Soldier.

 

They all know he’ll suit up alongside them every time.

 

Natasha closed her eyes. It’s not just the world who needs Iron Man, it’s also the Avengers.

 

“Then stop,” Clint lunged forward, but Natasha just danced away, “prioritising _Stark_.”

 

She knows she won’t die for Clint the way she’d die for Tony. Mostly because Clint could take care of himself, and Tony is… Tony is _fragile_ , touch-starved, like her, and… he’s _Tony_.

 

Clint looked her straight in the eye, “He’s not _Ana_.”

 

Natasha delivered a flawless corkscrew kick into his shoulder with more force than necessary, and he gasps, feeling it knock back the bone of his shoulder. Two punches followed in rapid succession, one to the man’s stomach and then another to his shoulder to keep him from retaliating.

 

She breathed deeply and looked away.

 

Natasha exited the ring and picked up her water bottle, tossing the contents back as she walked away.

 

 _He’s not Ana_.

 

The sole of her palm pressed into one of her eyes. _He’s not Ana_.

 

**

She likes the workshop.

 

It was a world of wonders inside the home she knew.

 

When Tony was in it, it was more lively, the sounds of whirring and metal being manipulated ringing through the air along with the deep bass of whatever Tony’s playing that moment, and Natasha doesn’t spend much time in the workshop, but when she does, Tony smiles indulgently and points a screwdriver to the rickety old sofa by the wall and the coffee machine, and Natasha always, always takes him up on his invitation.

 

In many ways, the workshop is Tony’s… _Red Room_. A home, where safety is perceived, where they are strongest, but filled with the knowledge that it can be corrupted easily, easily destroyed, that it could just as easily kill them as it could nurture and make them better. His Malibu home’s workshop is testament to that, and Natasha’s testament to that is a small room with a narrow bed at the Red Room, and a box filled with a red, blue, and green pen underneath the wooden box of her bed.

 

Tony downed a whole cup of coffee as he padded around the workshop barefoot, berating a very excited looking DUM-E, who is already coming near Natasha with her workshop version of her own cup holder filled with pens, a sketchbook that could easily be Steve’s stuck in between his claws, as well.

 

Natasha took the pen holder from DUM-E, “Thank you.” she says gratefully, if only to see Tony beam at them both, his smile hidden behind his coffee cup, which was coloured black and gold, like The Winter Soldier’s arm.

 

Tony caught her looking and held up the cup aloft, “Bucky gave this to me. He saw it at a Dollar Tree. Cheap bastard.” he shook his head, but his smile widened, and a pink blush started to ride high on his cheeks, and Natasha hummed in reply, patting DUM-E’s strut as the robot bent to draw a long line of red through the sketchpad, and Natasha smiled down at it, beginning to draw tiny little golden flowers around the crooked line.

 

They don’t speak for the duration of her stay down in the workshop, but Tony puts on some _Shostakovich_ , the soft sounds of the piano filtering in and around both of them, and Natasha all but melted into the sofa, with DUM-E scribbling at the sketchbook on her thigh.

 

She doesn’t have to dance to it, anymore.

 

She can just… listen.

 

**

 

Some days, when she looks at Tony, she remembers Anastasia.

 

The way he breathed life into everywhere he went, with the way he smiled, with the way he turned to look over his shoulder when someone called him, a tentative eyebrow lifted up in question. The way he grinned when someone made a joke, the way he guffawed and snorted when someone brushed their fingers against his side, the way he smiled softly when he greets them in the morning.

 

It hurts Natasha, on some of the days she sees it.

 

Because seeing Anastasia in Tony is seeing Tony’s weaknesses, his inability to be invincible. But he _fights back_. He always does. He claws out like he’s blinded by the darkness, snarling and trying to get his hands on anything that he can’t see but can hear and feel and smell.

 

The notion of knowing that Tony can and always will fight back and fight _for_ puts Natasha at ease in a way that counteracts the feeling of free falling every time she remembers Anastasia quietly kneeling on the ground, naked and the Winter Soldier’s hand around her throat, with Natasha unable to break free of the freezing hand that gripped at her hair.

 

So when she caught Tony’s bright brown eyes soften as The Winter Soldier leaned into the counter, a red-and-gold (and _hers_ ) coffee cup in his flesh hand, the smell of the coffee Tony’s brewed filling the air with a smell of home, she looked away, because that all too familiar smile in Tony’s face, the way he tilted his head towards The Winter Soldier makes her _sick_.

 

**

 

Her body freezes when she sees the Winter Soldier put a tentative hand on Tony Stark’s hip as they danced in the middle of the living room, yellow lights dimmed, a song she doesn’t know playing on the stereo, oddly scraggly, like it’d come straight from a rickety old radio.

 

She wants to close her eyes, but her brain chants, _look, look, look_ , making her catalogue what she’s seeing even though she doesn’t want to.

 

Tony laughs, and it’s not like any of the laughs she’s heard from him before, and something in her curls (it’s not jealousy) and makes her happy, even though her body is screaming for her to put a bullet in between the Winter Soldier’s eyes to keep her Tony safe. He puts his head on the Winter Soldier’s shoulder and _stays_ there, and Natasha strains her hearing to _know_ more, because he sighs, contented and… and _safe_ , like the way he’d teasingly insulted her during their sparring sessions, or when he’d call her callsign on the battlefield.

 

When Natasha finally gets her eyes to close, she can hear both the Winter Soldier and Tony Stark humming along to the song.

 

“ _Again… this couldn’t happen again_ …” Tony’s voice had always been beautiful. Low and dulcet, tones carrying beautifully into a room and filling it up with calmness or joy. Natasha once made him sing a Russian lullaby with her.

 

She forced herself to open her eyes, and The Winter Soldier is looking right at her, his nose buried into Tony’s hair as he sung, his voice scratchy and old, and not at all like the voice he’d used when he beat her to the ground with his violent fists, fists that curled around Tony’s body now, holding him _hostage_ , “ _Th_ _is is that once in a lifetime… this is a thrill divine,”_ he sang to Tony, and Tony breathed out laughter, tipping his head back to look at The Winter Soldier.

 

When they began to sing together, Natasha is hit with thick jealousy, and she put her hand on the doorway, gripping tightly.

 

“ _What’s more, this never happened before_ …” The Winter Soldier sang at Tony, his eyes removed from where it was staring at Natasha, those pale eyes becoming more blue, like clear glass being filled with seawater.

 

Tony brushed his nose against The Winter Soldier’s, “ _Though I have prayed for a lifetime_ ,”

 

“ _That such as you would suddenly be mine_ ,” they sang to each other, swaying in the soft light in the middle of the communal living room, not a care in the world, and Natasha bites her lower lip.

 

( _“No, put your—” Natasha waved her hand before she put her palm on the swell of Anastasia’s hip, “on my shoulder.”_

 

_“Like this?” She followed Natasha's instructions, biting her bottom lip as if she was unsure. A Black Widow trainee, unsure? Not in a million years. But tonight, when it's just Natalia and Anastasia, they're just two girls trying to do the waltz for the first time._

 

_“Yes, yes, like that.”_

 

_“What is this, Natalia?”_

 

_She smiled and looks at Anastasia’s bright amber eyes, and they could only ever do this in the dark, away from knowing, selfish eyes, but the moonlight is enough. She wouldn’t trade it for the world. “It’s called a waltz.”_

 

_Anastasia furrowed her eyebrows, curious, ever curious. “Will it hurt?”_

 

_Natasha brushed her lips against the crown of Anastasia’s hair, the tight curls pressing against her lips, “No.”)_

 

“ _We’ll have this moment forever…"_ Tony sighed as he leaned his head on The Winter Soldier’s chest, “ _But never, never again…_ ”

 

As the soft tinkling of the piano slowed to a stop, The Winter Soldier tilted Tony’s chin up, “Let’s do this again tomorrow night?”

 

Natasha doesn’t see Tony’s smile, but she can hear it (Natasha could hear Anastasia’s smiles in the dark, too) as he says, “I’ll take you up on that, lover boy.”

 

There are many things Natasha could prevent against. A bomb, a man falling from the sky, a woman from hitting her child, the invasion of enemies from a hole in the sky. Falling in love is not one of those.

 

She doesn’t know how.

 

**

 

“You said you knew how to love,” The Winter Soldier has an accent. It surprises no one but Natasha, it surprises the living hell out of Steve, and Tony loves it, but it doesn’t faze Natasha. It just makes her remember.

 

The kitchen is just quiet with the both of them in here, cold in a way it’s not when any of the other Avengers are in here. But that’s just what The Winter Soldier does.

 

He looked at Natasha with slate grey eyes, “Do you know how to love, or do you just know how to give yourself? Are you still that hollow doll from the Red Room, **кровопийца**?”

 

Natasha rolled her shoulders, gearing up for a fight she knows won’t come.

 

“No.” She looked straight into his eyes, “Will you kill him, too?”

 

In many ways, they are one and the same person. Victims of circumstances, indoctrinated against their will and with violence and lies beaten into the inner makings of their brains. They, for all intents and purposes, are natural-born killers. The Red Room and HYDRA just chose to make that the _only_ thing they _are_.

 

But they aren’t, not anymore, are they?

 

His slate-grey eyes turn blue,  “No.”

 

“I don’t trust you.”

 

“So do I.” He pauses and pours coffee into a black-and-gold mug, “But you trust him, no?”

 

“Yes.” There is no hesitation there. She hesitated, once, and it had almost killed them both.

 

His eyes are vividly blue when he turns his eyes back at her.

 

He says nothing, but he poured another cup of coffee into a red-and-gold mug, and slid it over to her.

 

And then he left.

 

The coffee was good.

 

**

Natasha shouted at The Winter Soldier when their latest villain’s goon took aim at him, but she knows she could make that shot, so she does, the bullet barely grazing The Winter Soldier’s head before embedding into the goon’s left eye.

 

The Winter Soldier looked at her. He nodded once, tightly.

 

Tony’s “Some great work there, team!” makes her warm in the pit of her stomach.

 

Cint hooted back with a, “Go Avengers!”

 

And Steve just sighed.

 

When she turned her back to The Winter Soldier, she found that she could do it easily.

 

**

 

In passing, Tony told her that he used to write letters to his dead parents. He never got the closure he needed, especially after The Winter Soldier was revealed to have been the one who killed them all along.

 

“You know, just little notes. Like, _dad, you’re an asshole, but I wish you were here to hear that_ or, _mom, I saw this snowglobe in Long Island you would have loved_ _even if you hated Long Island._ Shit like that, you know? I just… needed to tell something. Someone?” Tony shook his head and lifted a great box of metal scrap, barely grunting under its weight. His shoulders moved gracefully.

 

So now that she's alone in her room, she picked up her red pen, and opened the dark red notebook Sam had given her randomly one day when they’d been out, and began writing.

 

_Anastasia,_

 

_I am well. Older now, but well. It is difficult to go on through life without you by my side, and there is no moment where I don’t remember the colour of your eyes. Your eyes are the one thing I won’t forget, even when all memories have left me._

_The Winter Soldier is alive, could you believe it? After all those years, that killer is alive. I wonder, if you were here, would you help me dispose of him, or would you let him live? It scares me that I don’t know what you would do._

_And I have friends, now. Many. Not like the friends we had in the Red Room, no, and not friends like you and I. Though they love me, as well._

_I miss you. I always do._

~~_I wish you’d fought back_~~

 

Natasha closed the notebook and shoved it underneath her pillow, her breathing shallow.

 

**

“Hey, KGB.” Tony said flippantly where he’s draped across The Winter Soldier, his eyes lidded and filled with trust. Some movie is playing, but Natasha feels itchy, feels like she wants to tear out her skin.

 

Tony looked at her with those brown eyes that don’t change even in the darkness, “Come, come, rest your weary feet," he said in a faux old-man voice, beckoning at her with his fingers, "Bucky-babe will braid your hair.”

 

Natasha looks at The Winter Soldier, her breath catching at the base of her airways. Blue eyes look at her, and Tony stretched out one arm towards her, and Natasha takes it.

 

When she sits down, The Winter Soldier boxed her in with his knees on each shoulder, and taps a rapid message onto her shoulder, where it’s covered by a shirt, careful not to actually touch her.

 

“He’s got magic fingers. Trust me.” Tony yawned and put his head on The Winter Soldier’s thigh, carding his hand once through her hair, and Natasha felt herself nod.

 

**

She wrote this in pink ink,

 

_Anastasia,_

 

_You would like Tony Stark. He can speak Russian, but only ever uses it to curse out The Winter Soldier—his name is James, he goes by Bucky— when he has done something bad. You would do that to me when I picked on the girls behind Madame B’s back._

_I miss you and I love you._

 

**

And this, in navy blue ink.

 

 _Anastasia_ ,

 

_Her name is Ayo, and she threatened to put me in my place. She asked me if I liked steaks and wine. I don’t, but I do find her… likeable._

_I miss you, and I love you._

 

**

Golden ink. Steve gave her metallic colours for her birthday.

 

_Anastasia,_

_Bucky Barnes proposed to Tony. I didn’t know that much snot could come from a singular man. The wedding is in spring. A spring wedding._ _How unlike the Soldier._ _Ayo is my date. Would you be angry if I said I love her?_

_I miss you and I will always love you._

 

**

She found it easy to slide onto the edge of the landing pad on top of the building beside Bucky Barnes, their legs dangling, and then handing him one of her Marlboro Reds. The assassin took it, sniffing as he let the cigarette hang in between his lips.

 

“You taught me how to smoke, do you remember?” She asked in greeting, the sound of the flint wheel the only thing following her question. She handed him the small lighter towards him, and he moved to take it from her without their skin touching, before lighting his own cigarette.

 

“It don’t taste the same.” He confessed.

 

“You killed her. Do you remember?”

 

His eyes reflect the lights of New York City as he blew out three rings of smoke into the air. His voice is raspy but confident as he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

 

“She didn’t fight back.” Natasha confessed.

 

Bucky Barnes shrugged. “She saw a way out, and she took it.”

 

“So you’re saying she left me?”

 

Bucky let the cigarette hang in between his metal fingers, shaking his head as the ends of his lips pulls down, “Nah. You could survive. She couldn’t.”  _Survive killing you_ goes unsaid.

 

She was about to disagree, but she is _alive_ , isn’t she? Hurt, open with festering wounds, but alive.

 

**

 

In plain blue:

 

_Anastasia,_

 

_Today, I’m alive. I'm alive for myself, and for the people I love._

_I love you._

 

“Hey, Russian Blue!” Tony called out, a vision in a maroon dress shirt that's been folded up many times during the day, in his hands two different platters of cake, a huge smile on his face, his eyes bright brown and his cheeks pink. He looks happy. There’s a butterfly bandage across his face, and a bruise the colour of moss is forming on his cheek, but he’s still happy, alive, and _here_.

 

Clint came out carrying a whole cake, bright in his pale yellow shirt, and Sam has forks in his hands as he grinned giddily, like a child in the candy shop, his black eyes glinting against the sunlight. Steve and Bucky follow quickly after, wearing blue and slate grey respectively, and they’re smiling, too. Her eyes meet Barnes' blue, blue eyes and he smiled at her, before rushing in after Tony, who all but trips in his haste to carry the cakes over to Natasha.

 

She doesn’t dare cross the passage out with red.

**Author's Note:**

> dm me some prompts if u want, im kind of a free man for now. also, lets make buckytony superior [@maroonedstark](https://twitter.com/maroonedstark)
> 
> кровопийца- spider


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